Food
Pollok's
Nine miles west in Falls City, a family has been making kielbasa from the recipe their ancestors carried over in 1854, made only for family until they went public in the 1920s. They now turn out twelve thousand pounds a week and still sell only where they can deliver it themselves. Ask for the wedding sausage.
Food
Jafan Sno Cones
A snow cone stand in the most literal sense: in the middle of a neighborhood, in a family’s carport, and they live next door. The menu runs past a hundred flavors, most of them invented in-house. This is South Texas, so chamoy reigns. If you are feeling brave, order it topped with a Kool-Aid pickle.
Mesquite Wood Steakhouse
Four miles from the courthouse in Kenedy, a family opened a steakhouse in the middle of the pandemic after both parents lost their jobs. Everything worth ordering comes off a mesquite-wood flame and the smell off the plate is pure campfire. Start with the Wild West shrimp, then get the ribeye or the T-bone.
Culture
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church
The settlers finished this church before they built their own homes, which tells you what mattered to them. This is the second one, completed in 1877 after lightning took the first. Almost everything inside carries a story: the bell and the statue of Jesus came over on that very first boat in 1854.
Polish Heritage Center
In 1854 a group of Polish migrants fled hardship in Europe, landed at Indianola and made their way inland to found the oldest Polish settlement in America. They held their first mass under an oak tree on Christmas Eve. What followed was brutal: drought, rattlesnakes, and a community nearly everyone shunned.
Culture
Karnes County Courthouse
You can see it from every direction coming into town, and it genuinely looks like a castle: Romanesque Revival, finished in 1894, one of the prettiest in Texas. It is not the county’s first. That belonged to a rough cowboy town that lost the seat in one of the great Texas grudges. Step inside and look up.
